ABSTRACT
Commenting on the workers who joined Father Gapon’s fateful procession to the Winter Palace on 9 January 1905, Robert Latimer, a British evangelical committed to spreading the Word in Russia, wrote that: ‘Their religious aspirations, such of them as had any, were satisfied upon the extremely low level of the ordinary church ceremonial.’1 Few modern scholars have openly dissented from this doubly disdainful judgement.2 Indeed, by concentrating almost exclusively on Russian workers’ economic and political concerns, they have tacitly confirmed Latimer’s condescending opinion not only of the Russian Orthodox Church but also of the degree of religious awareness it managed to inculcate among its urban flock. I use the word ‘tacitly’ advisedly. In 1910, a contributor to the secular journal Zhizn’ dlia vsekh remarked that the average Petersburg worker was ‘neither for nor against religion. He had somehow expunged the very question of it’.3 The same could be fairly said of many historians.4 Yet the prevailing image of a sclerotic, not to say dormant, church ministering to an overwhelmingly apathetic flock surely merits further investigation: if it is accurate, it must be explained; if it is false, or exaggerated to the point of caricature, we may be in danger of neglecting an important dimension of Russian workingclass life.
